2. What Lorca Knew: Fragments of a Late Modernity (finish writing in 2014)

An expanded view of Lorquian hermeneutics, including more work on his American reception, his influence in Spain, the performative dimension of his poetics, how scholars do (and should) interpret him, etc...

????

I don't want to think too much about the third yet. If I do, it will start writing itself in my head and prevent me from finishing book #2. I think there will be a book 3. That is my intention now, but I can't even be sure, since I don't even want to know (a least not quite yet) what the book will be about. What is won't be is going through all his works in order and interpreting them. There's no point in me being the person to write that kind of book, which others have already done, with greater or lesser success, but adequately.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

In other words, not massive, not open, but yes, online and a course. I would choose 10-12 students from anywhere, we would choose a topic. We would have a time period, 10 weeks, say. It would be a virtual workshop or seminar. I would not record canned lectures but I would skype with each student or set up virtual tertulias. I would not charge the students the first time. Once I get the model working, then I would charge them on a sliding scale the 2nd time, nothing for grad students and $1,000 for full professors... or whatever works out logically.

Anyway, this might be one of those brilliant ideas that occur to me and turn out to be much less brilliant the next day. We'll see!

I want to use the speed of the internet and other technology, their power to reduce distances, while keeping the slowness of the analog humanities.

Instead of staring at it like I would with a painting, I have it memorized and have been turning it around in my head for a few days. I used it once as an exercise for my translation course. I had the students compare five competing translations of it. My very simplistic idea is that the translation should not simply ignore Machado's rhetorical figures.

So: "caminos ... laberínticos" is a figure called "hyperbaton," violently distorting normal word order. It is a mimetic figure here, meant to represent the winding paths. Machado rarely uses hyperbaton so it is not a feature of his style; it needs to be explained. This is also the only point in the poem where there is enjambment.

Allusion: labyrinth and chimera allude to Greek mythology. Two other words have Greek etymologies: crypts and melancholy. This is part of the poem's logopeia, or usage of words in an evocative way. "Retablo," used to mean a puppet theater, could allude to an episode from DQ.

Ambiguity: "de viejo" can mean "of old" or "an old man's." The first reading is more plausible but the second is impossible to rule out.

Alliteration: three words start with the syllable es in the second stanza. Each of these words has three syllables.

There is some internal assonant rhyme: figurillas / amiga / florida. This is aside from the main rhyme scheme of the poem, the assonance in even-numbered lines with the vowels e - o.

Contrast or antithesis: between depth and height: deep crypts / ladders over the stars, or: juguetes de viejo. Past and future: hopes and memories. Smiling and melancholy.

The entire poem evokes the power of the dream-like mind to create spatial metaphors over an imaginary landscape, as well as a kind of mental puppet theater. The mood moves from bitter, to melancholy, to sweet and rose-colored. There is no first person singular (or plural), so the reading of the poem puts the reader herself in the position of evoking this mental theater. It is not about the poet's individual experience, but about anybody's experience. The use of the word "amigas" as a feminine adjective suggests the concept "female friends" as well. The entire last stanza has a feminine air to it, with its flowers and pinkness.

Syntactically, the main device used is apposition: a list of elements aligned in successive noun clauses. There are only four verbs, and three are in relative clauses. The main work is done with nouns and eight highly descriptive adjectives.

The metrical flow of the poem is unpredictable, with lines of 7 and 11 syllables used in irregular combination, and no regularity in the accents interior to the line. Three of the six 11 syllable lines have the "melodic" variation on the hendacasyllable, with the accent on the 3rd syllable. The word "tortuosas" is subject to a metrical phenomenon known as "dieresis," where the dipthong uo is separated into two syllables.

Historically, we can see this as Machado's interiorization of the symbolist / modernista mode of turn-of-the-century poetry in Spanish. He avoids ostentatiously ornamental elements, whether in his rhythms or his visual imagery, which is more fuzzy than sharp. He is not describing a singular object but listing types of things in the plural: there are twelve plural nouns in 12 lines!

There is a high concentration of Poundian values: melos, phanos, logos. Language is charged with meaning. In other words, it is a poem of the type people think of as good in the conventional sense: it doesn't challenge us by being "anti-poetic" or "prosaic."

It ought to be easy to preserve some of the syntactic figures, the visual imagery, and the etymological allusions, in a good translation. Crypt in English is "an underground room or vault beneath a church, used as a chapel or burial place." It has that mysterious air to it: "from Greek kruptē ‘a vault,’ from kruptos ‘hidden.’" A translation, following Appiah's idea of "thick translation" ought be revelatory enough so that you could teach the poem in translation to students who didn't know Spanish, so if you used "vault" instead of "crypt" it wouldn't be so good.

Monday, November 25, 2013

Roland Barthes’s theorization of French cultural specificity, in a well-known but not particularly well-studied essay, “The Grain of the Voice,” offers a suggestive parallel to the performance of Spanish exceptionalism in Lorca’s “Juego y teoría del duende.” Barthes, too, develops an idiosyncratically “nationalist” poetics through the vehicle of a theory of the vocal performance of lyric poetry. His concept of the “grain,” like Lorca’s duende, is at once highly personal and seductively universalizable. Read together, these two essays suggest the possibility of a sophisticated theorization of poetic performance. The issues raised in Lorca’s duende lecture and in Barthes’s essay still remain outside of the institutional and disciplinary boundaries of theory, as delimited by the standard textbooks like The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory or Critical Theory Since 1965. Performance studies, needless to say, is a developing discipline in its own right, with its own set of concerns, but it has not tended to give much attention to the specificity of lyric poetry, or to the role of performance within the cluster of theoretical problems defined by the word poetics. By the same token, very few texts in the canon of literary theory address issues related to the vocal performance of lyric poetry: to find treatments of these issues, one must consult more specialized works, such as the articles collected in Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Jill Kuhnheim’s forthcoming study of cultural practices of poetry recitation in Latin America provides another fruitful avenue of approach, but performance, by and large, remains marginal within the academic study of poetry.

In Mythologies, Barthes devotes an article to denouncing a certain excess in performance, a kind of semiotic overdetermination. “Bourgeois Vocal Art” is singing in which a particular emphasis on certain phonemes strongarms the listener into a predictable response. In “The Grain of the Voice,” written in a different phase of his career, Barthes takes a somewhat different approach, one that is perhaps less resistant to the pleasures of semiotic excess. The French writer begins the essay by complaining about the tyranny of the adjective in music criticism: the dominance of this part of speech seems reductive to him, and he proposes the concept of the “grain” in order to enact a “displacement” of a certain standard rhetoric that attaches labels, formulaic predicate adjectives to music. From Julia Kristeva, he borrows a binary opposition—the geno-text vs. pheno-text—in order to contrast two two distinct approaches to the performance of vocal music. The pheno-song is identified with everything conventional:

The pheno-song [...] covers all the phenomena, all the features which belong to the language being sung, the rules of the genre, the coded form of the melisma, the composer's idiolect, the style of the interpretation: in short, everything in the performance that is in the service of communication, representation, expression, everything that is customary to talk about, which forms the tissue of cultural values.
(Barthes 182)

The “geno-song,” in contrast, consists of

the volume of the singing and speaking voice, the space where significations germinate “from within language and its very materiality”; it forms a signifying play having nothing to do with communication, representation, (of feelings) expression.
(Ibid.)

Barthes identifies the “geno-song,” more particularly, with the encounter between musical expression and phonology: “It is, in a very simple word that must be taken seriously, the diction of the language” (183; original emphasis).

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Interpretations of Lorca’s duende often treat it as though it were merely a variation on the familiar theme of poetic or artistic inspiration—the peculiarly Spanish version of the muse. Lorca himself, while emphasizing live performance, is purposefully expansive in defining the reach of the duende, applying the term to a copious number of examples in the visual arts, and to the composition (and not exclusively the performance) of music and poetry. Moreover, by presenting his theory as an explicit alternative to the muse and the angel, he inscribes it within familiar narratives of poetic inspiration. Still, he does indicate that the duende is most duende-like in the live performance of art-forms that require “un cuerpo vivo que interprete, porque son formas que nacen y mueren de modo perpetuo y alzan sus contornos sobre un presente exacto” (a live body that interprets them, since they are forms that are born and die perpetually and erect their shapes in an exact present).

It is striking to conceive the dramatic struggle of all artistic creation—as in the painter’s struggle with the blank canvas or the poet’s with the blank page—in its performative dimension. To read the duende as another theory of artistic creation, however, is to lose sight of performance itself in its more immediate and literal sense. This seemingly more literal-minded approach, needless to say, should not exclude metaphorical displacements: in fact, it turns out to be extremely difficult to look at performance in itself, without displacing it or making it stand in for other values. An emphasis on performance and orality, then, could serve as a heuristic device—designed to bring a particular aspect of Lorca’s poetics into sharper focus—rather than as the definitive interpretation of Lorca’s duende.
Apart from studies of the oral poetry of traditional societies, like Paul Zumthor’s Oral Poetics, there are still relatively few texts of contemporary literary theory that directly address the poetics of performance. Roland Barthes’s “The Grain of the Voice” provides a convenient point of departure for a consideration of Lorca’s “Juego y teoría del duende” as a meditation on the performative dimension of poetry and song. Barthes’s essay, not coincidentally, also links the performance of song to cultural exceptionalism. Claudio Rodríguez’s thesis on the children’s songs, likewise, might be profitably compared to Lorca’s lecture on Spanish lullabies. Read together, such prose texts form the basis of a pragmatist poetics, rooted in the immediate circumstances of the performance and reception of poetry and other forms of vocal art. This performative and pragmatic bias in Lorca’s poetics, in turn, reveals a new way of thinking about Lorca’s presence in contemporary Spanish poetry: perhaps his strongest influence is more musical than philosphical, more attuned to the body of the performer than to the mind of the interpreter.

Here is the second set of notes I wrote. Oddly prophetic of all the work I'm doing now.

(1) Performativeness (degrees of). Here the idea is that less performative performances are equally performative. In other words, performances that de-emphasize "drama," that are drier and more oriented toward a reproduction of what's on the page, are equally worthy of attention. By the same token, very stylized performances are not necessarily more performative than ones that strive for "realism." This whole question has to be rethought.

(2) Pedagogy. Elocution, in my Grandmother's generation, was the way literature was taught. She could give dramatic readings of texts she had memorized well into her 90s. Performance implies a new pedagogy, in which students themselves should be performers. But, as Steve Evans points out in his interview with ??? [Al Filreis], performance is still kind of an afterthought. The poem on the page still reigns supreme, and we need to find a way of making more than a mere supplement.

(3) Improvisation. Not all performance is improvisation, but improvisation is always a performance. All performance does involve an element of "liveness," of attentiveness to the present. Improvisation brings that attentitiveness to the forefront. It might also be interesting to look at performance in terms of preparation, of logistics.

(4) Duende. The duende is in the first instance a theory of performance, not of artistic creation or inspiration. What interests me here is the way in which a theory of performance can be paradigmatic, primary rather than secondary, in poetics. I also want to explore the slippage between performance and creation in Lorca's theory of the duende.

(5) Song setting. What is fascinating here is the way in which a poem might be derived from a melody or a melody from a text. A kind of translation?

(6) Vocal stylings. Certain singers put across the words in an ideal way, not by overdramatizing, but by using melody, voice, and phrasing to get at the best possible oral interpretation of that particular lyric. On the other hand, there are performance practices that sacrifice the words to vocal techniques. Vowels must be sung a certain way in the interest of sonority, to the detriment of the text. There is fertile ground for theorization here.

(7) Prosody. Usually, once performance happens, prosody is forgotten--paradoxically. That is, there is a kind of false opposition between the prosody on the page and the prosody in the voice. The object of phonology is a written sentence. This needs to be rethought. People wanting to do this field seriously should learn a little more linguistics.

(8) Voice. I'd like to look at the human voice itself as the basis of everthing else. If you had a theory of the voice you would have a theory of the performance of any linguistic performance.

(9) Timbre. I've written a paper on the theory of timbre, that you can probably still see at the Hall Center for the Humanities Website. (Many of these points are overlapping rather than discretely separated.)

(10) Rhythm. Performances happen in time; they are rhythmically organized in some fashion. Actors might wait a "beat" before proceeding. A theory of performance would need a good account of rhythm. My study of percussion over the past 10 years or so has taught me a lot, though I am not at all a good drummer.

At one point the book I was writing was going to be about Lorca and performance. I am grafting some of that material back into the book for a new chapter (4) that will cover some of this ground. I found some notes I made on performance theory before I taught my seminar with Jill K. on poetry and performance. I was trying to figure out everything I knew about peformance theory before teaching the course.

1) Theory of theater. One place from which performance theory emerged is from work in drama and theater. The basic idea is that the literary study of the theatrical text on the page is not sufficient without a look at the impliciations of how theater is performed and the concrete circumstances that surround performance. In Aristotelian terms, this is spectacle, one of six major elements (and a bit of melos too).

2) Semiotics.. Barthes's essays on Brecht, for example, point to a semiotics of theater. The idea is that elements of spectacle are signs in the same way that words are. Theater can be studied as a total signifying system in which language is only one element. Dramatists who de-emphasize verbal signifying in favor of other performative elements lead to this study (Artaud).

3) Anthropology. But Performance is not just theater. From an anthropological perspective, theater is but one kind of performance. Game, rituals, and the performance of "roles" in everyday life are also part of a larger category. Artaud's exposure to other forms of theater in Bali was influential in his ideas. The anthropological perspective entails a less ethnocentric view of things.

5) Poetics Beyond Ethnopoetics. The contributors to Bernstein's Close Listening bring performance studies into the orbit of Language Poetry, with a critique of conventional poetry readings and an exploration of many issues involved in the oral performance of poetry, also from a less theatrico-centric perspective.

6) Orality. Walter Ong's distinction between orality and literacy is a significant backdrop to performance theory. Not all performances imply an opposition to literacy, but all are in some sense "oral," in that they involve spoken language (if they have language at all). Previous work on Serbian oral epic lays behind some of this thinking.

7) Cultural Studies. Performance theory fits the agenda of Cultural Studies, in its emphasis on popular culture, the performance of social roles in subcultures, etc...

8) Performativity. Theory of performance might bring into play Chomsky's competence / performance distinction, or Judith Butler's sense that social roles are performed, or the performativity of speech act theory. In short, there is a kind of fruitful punning on the word performance itself.

9) Audience. A theory of performance is a theory of the audience, usually involving the physical presence of a public and some notion of reception. It's true that the "reader" is often invoked in discussions of literature, but in discussions of performance the spectator is more alive and concrete, not a reader merely posited as a theoretical construct.

10) Body. With performance, the body of the performer comes into play. Not the merely theoretical body involved in writing from / with the body.

Saturday, November 23, 2013

Interpretations of Lorca’s duende often treat it as though it were merely a variation on the familiar theme of poetic or artistic inspiration—the peculiarly Spanish version of the muse. Lorca himself, while emphasizing live performance, is purposefully expansive in defining the reach of the duende, applying the term to a copious number of examples in the visual arts, and to the composition (not exclusively the performance) of music and poetry. Moreover, by presenting his theory as an explicit alternative to the muse and the angel, he inscribes it within familiar narratives of poetic inspiration. Still, he does indicate that the duende is most duende-like in the live performance of art-forms that require “un cuerpo vivo que interprete, porque son formas que nacen y mueren de modo perpetuo y alzan sus contornos sobre un presente exacto” (a live body that interprets them, since they are forms that are born and die perpetually and erect their shapes in an exact present).

It is striking to conceive the dramatic struggle of all artistic creation—as in the painter’s struggle with the blank canvas or the poet’s with the blank page—in its performative dimension. To read the duende as another theory of artistic creation, however, is to lose sight of performance itself in its more immediate and literal sense. This seemingly more literal-minded approach, needless to say, should not exclude metaphorical displacements: in fact, it turns out to be extremely difficult to look at performance in itself, without displacing it or making it stand in for other values. An emphasis on performance and orality, then, might serve as a heuristic device—designed to bring a particular aspect of Lorca’s poetics into sharper focus—rather than as the definitive interpretation of Lorca’s duende.
Apart from studies of the oral poetry of traditional societies, like Paul Zumthor’s Oral Poetics, there are still relatively few texts of contemporary literary theory that directly address the poetics of performance. Roland Barthes’s “The Grain of the Voice” provides a convenient point of departure for a consideration of Lorca’s “Juego y teoría del duende” as a meditation on the performative dimension of poetry and song. Barthes’s essay, not coincidentally, also links the performance of song to cultural exceptionalism. Claudio Rodríguez’s thesis on the children’s songs, likewise, might be profitably compared to Lorca’s lecture on Spanish lullabies. Read together, such prose texts might form the basis of a pragmatist poetics, rooted in the immediate circumstances of the performance and reception of poetry and other forms of vocal art.

This performative and pragmatic interpretation of Lorquian poetics, finally, suggests a new perspective on his influence on contemporary Spanish poetry: perhaps ...

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Interpretations of Lorca’s duende often treat it as though it were merely a variation on the familiar theme of poetic or artistic inspiration—the Spanish version of the muse. Lorca himself, as we have seen, is purposefully slippery, applying the term to the visual arts as well as to the composition (not exclusively the performance) of music and poetry, and presenting his theory as an alternative to the muse and the angel. Nevertheless, he does indicate that the duende is most duende-like in the live performance of music, poetry, and dance, since those art-forms require “un cuerpo vivo que interprete, porque son formas que nacen y mueren de modo perpetuo y alzan sus contornos sobre un presente exacto” (a live body to interpret, since they are forms that are born and die perpetually and erect their shapes over an exact present).

It is striking to conceive the dramatic struggle of artistic creation itself—as in the painter’s struggle with the blank canvas or the poet’s with the blank page—in its performative dimension. (Although poetry can be a performative art, many poets have adopted Lorca’s duende without relating it directly to performance.) To read the duende as yet another theory of inspiration, however, is to lose sight of performance in a more literal sense. The more literal-minded approach I am proposing, of course, does not exclude allegorical displacements: in fact, it turns out to be extremely difficult to look at performance in itself, without displacing it by making it stand in for other values. My emphasis on performance and orality, then, is a heuristic device designed to bring a particular aspect of Lorca’s poetics into sharper focus.

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

"Andrew O’Hagan writes: ‘Joan Didion gave me her hand and she was so thin it felt like I was holding a butterfly’ (LRB, 7 November). A beautiful sentence, but I wondered about the simile’s plausibility. It’s been reported that Didion weighs less than eighty lbs. She’s so thin her doctors have put her on an ice cream diet to keep her mass up. A woman’s hand is said to be 0.5 per cent of her body weight. So if Didion weighs 75 lbs, her hand probably weighs about six ounces. The world’s heaviest butterfly, the female Queen Victoria Birdwing, weighs about two grams. There are about 28 grams in an ounce, and Joan Didion’s hand probably weighs about the same as holding 86 female Queen Victoria Birdwings..."

[from a letter to the London Review of Books].

Well, I think the guy coming up with the simile knew that a human hand does not literally weigh as much as a butterfly. The simile is plausible because that was the mental image he got when he shook her hand.

This made me think. I'm trying to push for the idea that you should at least consider the literal level of the metaphor before you just try to forget about it. Performance, for example, is often used just as a metaphor for all kind of notions of authenticity and spontaneity. You can't study performance in an of itself, because the reason you are studying it has to do with these positive human values you want to tie it to.

Interpretations of Lorca’s duende often treat it as though it were merely a variation on the familiar theme of poetic or artistic inspiration—the Spanish version of the muse. As we saw in Chapter 1, Lorca himself is purposefully slippery, applying the term to the visual arts as well as to the composition (not exclusively the performance) of music and poetry. Nevertheless, he does indicate that the duende is most duende-like in the live performance of music, poetry, and dance, since those art-forms require “un cuerpo vivo que interprete, porque son formas que nacen y mueren de modo perpetuo y alzan sus contornos sobre un presente exacto” ( ). My next task, then, is to treat the duende more literally as a theory of performance, rather than viewing performance as a convenient metaphor for the dramatic struggle of artistic creation. As in chapter 2, in which I took Lorca at his word in interpreting the duende lecture as a theory of cultural exceptionalism, this more literal-minded approach does not exclude allegorical displacements. In fact, it turns out to be extremely difficult to look at performance in itself, without diplacing it by making it stand in for other values. My emphasis on performance and orality, then, is a heuristic device designed to bring a particular aspect of Lorca’s poetics into sharper focus.•••

Thursday, November 14, 2013

I guess I don't understand this story. It looks like a psychologist borrowed an equation from a physics paper just arbitrarily. I don't understand why you need a math person even to tell you that this is bullshit.

Friday, November 8, 2013

Of those aligned at least with one visible column of the U.S. American avant-garde, more than a few writers have been so obedient to formal mandate and the certainties of development as to discount the likelihood that those imperatives, as with every hazard of orthodoxy, are narrowly if any longer defiant of our state of affairs.

Here I can't really figure out who's doing what to whom. Apparently there are several visible columns of the avant-garde, and some writers aligned with at last one of them. Some of these writers are obedient to something called "formal mandate" (what is that?) and equally vague "certainties of development." But these beliefs are apparently are no longer "defiant of our state of affairs." The essay concludes with some feel-good language:

My desire is for careful energizing words to structure the astonishment that is our accountability to language, foresight, and gesture. Metaphoric language in the mediated world can so beckon into action—into experience and knowledge—as to prompt the unforeseen. Constitutive of social space and cultural selfhood, the syllabic realism of metaphor obliges an urgent kind of carefulness that emboldens the critical imagination to alter our picture of the present and the shape of things to come.

Who could be against all these wonderful things, accountability, astonishment, foresight, gesture, carefulness, the social, cultural selfhood, action, metaphor, critical imagination, the shape of things to come? Surely the avant-garde itself is for all of this, as is the anti-avant-garde, and everyone in between.

Whatever the avant-garde stands for, though, I think it could be a good barrier against this kind of sloppy writing and thinking. Syllabic realism? Really?